Critical Linking: April 25th, 2013

There are American novelists, and then there are American women novelists – at least according to Wikipedia, where outrage has been building over the quiet categorisation of major names such as Harper Lee and Donna Tartt according to their gender.

Time to turn our attention from the old boys’ clubs at The New York Times Book Review and other established literary outlets to the new boys’ clubs of Wikipedia, Reddit, and the like. This is where the action is.

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He explained that The Times’s three staff book critics — Michiko Kakutani, Janet Maslin and Dwight Garner — make their own decisions about what to review. They do so without regard to, or knowledge of, what the editors of the Sunday Book Review, a separate entity, may have assigned or have planned. The Book Review has its own editor and staff.”

The reality is that intelligence is much more diverse than what we develop in school and college. In addition, troubled educational systems have left many students unprepared for a four-year liberal arts curriculum. We need a more diverse pallet of schools to meet the diverse needs of learners.

Alexandria, Virginia is the most well-read city in America once again, according to Amazon’s annual ranking that measures ”all book, magazine and newspaper sales in both print and Kindle format” in cities around the country.

Not sure that’s exactly the rubric I would use to decide which city is the most well-read. Also, not sure that ranking cities like this is interesting, useful, or really doable at all.

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